Red Hat today rolled out a major new release to its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform that's designed to offer better support for containers and cloud-native applications.

It's been 10 years since Red Hat acquired JBoss, but much has changed in the technology world since then. Now, JBoss EAP 7 is optimized for cloud environments, Red Hat says. The platform combines Java EE 7 APIs (application programming interfaces) with key devops tools including Red Hat’s JBoss Developer Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Also included are Jenkins, Arquillian, Maven, and support for several Web and JavaScript frameworks.

The new release is lightweight and features a small footprint, Red Hat says, making it well-suited for building either traditional or more modular, microservices-style applications.

When deployed with Red Hat's OpenShift platform-as-a-service (PaaS), JBoss EAP 7 helps businesses take advantage of containers, load balancing, elastic scaling, and health monitoring. Users can deploy to a container directly from the IDE, for example. By eliminating the need for overlapping features, it could contribute to a more architecturally efficient devops environment.

With the new release, Red Hat hopes to "bridge the reality of building and maintaining a business today with the aspiration of IT innovation tomorrow,” said Mike Piech, Red Hat's vice president and general manager for middleware.

JBoss EAP 7 is now available for download by members of the Red Hat Developers community. Customers can get the latest updates from the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Also today, Red Hat rolled out its new JBoss Core Services Collection, which provides common foundational building blocks for enterprise applications, including web single sign-on, HTTP load balancing, proxying, and management and monitoring capabilities for applications and services.

The collection is included as part of a Red Hat JBoss Middleware subscription at no additional charge. Customers receive full online and phone support, updates, patches, and security fixes for each component version.

Katherine Noyes has been an ardent geek ever since she first conquered Pyramid of Doom on an ancient TRS-80. Today she covers enterprise software in all its forms, with an emphasis on cloud computing, big data, analytics and artificial intelligence.